Dashboard Week Day 2

by Katharine Peace

It’s day two of dashboard week for DS12 here at TIL. If you don’t know what dashboard week is then allow me to explain, dashboard week is a week long period during which each cohort member must produce one dashboard and an accompanying blog post daily. Each day of dashboard week (other than Monday) also commences with a presentation of the previous day’s accomplishments. The daily challenge is announced by Andy via blog post ca. 9.00 am. Yesterday we worked with the SWAPI (Star Wars API) for our data and each person was assigned an API request to make. Today Andy decided to direct our attentions towards historical data collected from the London Marathon.

Andy asked us to collect the data resulting from a search of the first two letters of our surnames for all available years (the data runs from 1981 – 2018). With the help of Alteryx, I downloaded the data for all available years and then brought the data into Tableau. After yesterday’s flop, my aims today were to plan out my data and to also make a dashboard plan. I also wanted to try make something new and take some inspiration from the internet. I’m looking at dashboard week as an opportunity to try lots of new things.

With that in mind, I decided to try and re-make the tracker available on the London Marathon website. This tracker is currently only available for 2018 results. I wanted to try and produce one that would work for all years. To do this I had to bring in a spatial file of the running route and then plot the runner’s positions using their finish time and the assumption that their speed was constant throughout the race (I’m aware this isn’t a completely accurate assumption but it meant the project could work). As many points needed to be created for each runner over the course of the race, this resulted in over 39 million rows of data. Hence, my work pace slowed down as the day progressed, however, I did produce a dashboard on which you can select your name, or number and refine by year. Unfortunately, due to the 15,000,000 row limit of tableau server I couldn’t upload all the years.

Due to the time taken to work with the large data quantities, I didn’t really manage to make my dash look as pretty as I would like. I also then couldn’t upload all the data so it was a little pointless. Pages also doesn’t work on server but if the point is to have fun then I did so it wasn’t all a waste of time! For tomorrow I am going to aim to get my scope a little better (and as I am shadowing Ben with teaching Alteryx for half the day tomorrow, I won’t really have a choice!).

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Katharine Peace

Thu 28 Feb 2019

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